One World Romania, 2014 - Interview with Hasan Metehan Ozkan

My Child presents an inspiring group of Turkish parents of LGBT individuals, who have gone through the difficult path of accepting their children for who they were. Filmed in their own homes, with the camera placed directly in front of their faces, Errol Morris-style, they talk about their most intimate anxieties, experienced when realizing what their children were going through in a conservative society such as today’s Turkey. For them, learning that their children were LGBT implied a gradual re-learning of how to be parents – a steep curve which included their own version of ‘coming out’ and culminated with the discovery of activism ‘out of love’. This is neither a lesson in alternative parenthood nor a conventional advocacy piece. It is a deeply humane story with real parents re-discovering themselves and their children, and deciding to stand up for them. If an 80-year-old religious grandmother from rural Turkey can accept her grandchild the way he is, what excuse do we have?
“What I realized over the recent years is that parents do not have sons or daughters, they have children. I thought I had a daughter, and then I learnt that, actually, I had a son. What really matters to me is that he is my child”.